David Round: Thoughts for our Time - Article 14

Prediction is hard ~ especially, as Yogi Berra is alleged to have said, about the future. Harold MacMillan, when asked what politicians fear the most, replied ~ ‘Events, dear boy, events’. Who has a crystal ball? International events ~ war, the interruption of overseas trade, financial calamity ~ even something a simple as the breakdown of the internet, or the actions of Artificial Intelligence ~ could fundamentally alter everything tomorrow. We might be flooded with refugees, or we might be the only people left in the world. We might all pull together in an emergency, or we might all tear ourselves apart. There might be a new pandemic, or climate catastrophes. A decent earthquake could destroy us overnight ~ without electricity for any length of time, without vital roads and bridges and the electronic systems we all rely on all the time ~ not to mention cooked meals and electric light and hot water ~ we would be plunged back into the dark ages. They say that only nine meals, three days, stand between civilisation and violence. A serious widespread drought would take only a bit longer.

David Round: Thoughts for our Time - Article 13

Although it may be a slight digression from the main direction of these columns ~ and I risk being accused of being part of a ‘white feeding frenzy’, in the words of the head honcho of one of the growing number of Maori Parties ~ it may be of interest to consider several recent ‘reports’ about what a dreadful country we are.

David Round: Thoughts for our Time - Article 12

We used to have the Rule of Law in this country. Increasingly it is being replaced by the rule of laws and the rule of lawyers.

The Rule of Law was given its capital letters in the nineteenth century by Professor Dicey, who identified it as requiring legal authority for any actions by officials attempting to interfere with the freedom of citizens. No-one was to be punished ~ to suffer in person or land or goods ~ except after a fair trial before impartial courts of law for a clearly-defined wrong. In the Latin phrase, nulla poena sine lege ~ there was to be no punishment without a law to authorise it. And they were to be clear and definite laws ~ nothing as vague as, say, ‘crimes prejudicial to the state’. Only a minimum of discretion could be allowed to officials. We were to be ruled by law, not by other people’s discretion and whim.

David Round: Thoughts for our Time - Article 11

We are not in charge. We are being stitched up by a bossy professional class which is metastasizing at the rate of a runaway cancer. Every year there are more laws and regulations telling us what to do and not do. There are not just environmental regulations for farmers and foresters. They are the extra road signs and white lines and cycleways and bus lanes planted everywhere on roads, the physical searches at airports as security men with rubber gloves give us the once over, new regulations about everything, the continual attempts of government agencies to indoctrinate us and tell us what we may and may not think.... The Broadcasting Standards Authority’s bid to ban the description of tikanga as ‘mumbo-jumbo’ is just yet another unsurprising power grab by a handful of overpaid entitled self-righteous bullies.

David Round - Thoughts for our Time - Article 10

The English Civil Wars, which culminated in the beheading of the king on the 30th of January 1649, had been preceded by a long period of widespread discontent and growing public anger. Four years after coming to the throne, Charles had embarked on what his opponents called the ‘Eleven Years Tyranny’; eleven long years when the king did not once summon a parliament, and attempted to survive financially not by Parliamentary grants but by a variety of increasingly resented expedients ~ the sale of monopolies and honours, forced loans ~ and the king also had the ancient right to imprison without cause, which he imposed on those who did not care to lend him money ~ and the rigorous enforcement of ancient prerogatives, many of which, indeed, had long fallen into disuse and been half forgotten. Prominent among such prerogatives was the right to levy ‘Ship Money’. Originally coastal towns had been obliged to provide ships for the navy, but this had long been commuted to a monetary payment which the king could demand in time of war for the defence of the realm. Parliament alone, of course, had the right to impose new taxes and impositions on subjects, but it was perfectly lawful for the king to exercise rights he already possessed.

David Round: Thoughts for our Time - Article 9

It is no exaggeration to speak of possible judicial tyranny. Already, New Zealand judges have succeeded in turning the nonsense of a Treaty of Waitangi ‘partnership’ into something approaching a fundamental legal principle. Their interpretation of the current foreshore and seabed legislation raises the genuine possibility that they might decide to ‘recognise’ Maori ownership of much of that immensely important and treasured public resource, in the teeth of Parliament’s clear intention that that not happen. They have just announced that ‘tikanga’ ~ whatever exactly that means ~ is part of our fundamental law. What might that involve? It will be up to the judges to decide; but the Supreme Court is of course determined to continue the ‘process of decolonisation’. The Maori Party has already announced that its policies include a tariff ~ a tax ~ on all sales and leases of land in this country, presumably justified on the ground that all this land was originally owned by Maori and there is still some lingering Maori authority over it. Already such policies are looming in Canada and Australia. Is it beyond the bounds of possibility that our very comfortably-off judges decide that, even without legislation to that effect, some such obligation exists? Or that in other respects local Maori have the final yea or nay on any proposed developments and changes? If the judges are in charge, as they are now beginning to claim ~ as our previous Chief Justice stated, and as various Supreme Court decisions also seem to state ~ what is to stop them?

David Round: Thoughts for our Time - Article 8

In 1927 a French philosopher and novelist, Julien Benda, wrote a book called La Trahison des Clercs ~ The Treason of the Intellectuals. (Clerc, which gives us our words clerk and clergy, meant originally a clergyman, then any literate man.) Nothing is free, and we support our ‘intellectual’ class not because we love them but because they too have contributions to make to the public good. They are not ‘irresponsible’. We expect them to uphold civilised and rational values against their, and our, enemies. Yet all too often, Benda lamented, the intellectuals, while still demanding their generous salaries and privileged positions, pursued their own crazy and pernicious ideas. They betray the public good.

David Round: Thoughts for our Time - Article 7

I grew up in a different country ~ the New Zealand of more than half a century ago. It had its faults, of course, as all countries do, but in an imperfect world it was pretty good. It was a now-vanished golden era of optimism, prosperity and opportunity.

I was younger, and rather more naive than I am now, but as I recall I would, in my idealistic youthful innocence, have been prepared to fight and die for my country. My father had served in ‘the war’, as we still speak of it, as did uncles, some of whom did not return; I had a grandfather at Gallipoli, and a great uncle killed at Messines....

David Round: Thoughts for our Time - Article 6

Diversity, we have long been assured is our greatest strength. The more diversity there is, the better. We actually boast about our cultural diversity. We rejoice every time another bedraggled group of refugees arrives here, because this increases the number of cultures we have in this country (as if a wrecked fragment of some other people constitutes a valid living ‘culture’). The more the merrier!

David Round: Thoughts for our Time - Article 5

Representative democracy works only for as long as the elected representatives are ready to respect the wishes of the electors. There may sometimes be a tension between the wishes of the electors and the conscientious beliefs of the elected ~ the great Edmund Burke was among those who argued that a Member of Parliament was not a mere mouthpiece to repeat unthinkingly what his electors told him, but also had a duty to his (or her) own honest sincere convictions. But Burke would also have agreed, of course, that MPs are obliged to serve their electors to the best of their ability, should strive, at least, to represent their wishes, and in any case should always respect them.

David Round: Thoughts for our Time - Article 4

Asylum seekers and refugees are in the news once more; not only in Europe, where popular exasperation at governments’ betrayal of their own citizens is increasingly openly expressed, but even in our own country. Ministers are talking of new legislation to allow electronic monitoring. Needless to say, numerous groups who make their comfortable livings out of being nice to refugees and asylum seekers are deeply concerned that we may not be welcoming enough.

David Round: Thoughts for our Time - Article 3

I ended my previous column by arguing that the people in charge of Western societies are displaying many symptoms of insanity. To be slightly more charitable, we could say that they merely display the classic symptoms of any culture in its late degenerate age. There may not be much difference. Civilisations rise and they decline. ‘Hard times create strong men; strong men create good times; good times create weak men; weak men create hard times’. Every civilisation becomes a victim of its own success. It loses confidence in itself and its own achievements. While still believing itself invincible it despises the very means by which it came to greatness. It defames its great men and demolishes their monuments. It worships that which it is not ~ the barbarian, the bruiser, the angry refugee and the weird sexual outlaw, the gladiator and the brainless muscular sporting ‘hero’, the clueless adolescent and the thuggish spokesman for the oppressed. It actually wants to be hurt. It fantasises about being....dominated. ‘Insanity’ becomes just a cultural judgment. It eschews being ‘judgmental’. It tolerates everything. Why should our opinions be thought better than anyone else’s? Post-modernism and ‘multiculturalism’ are its philosophies. History is revised into a catalogue of our own sins.

David Round: Thoughts for our Time - Article 2

New Zealand is not the social laboratory of the world. We have, and have always had, the same ideas, the same fashions, the same follies, as everyone else in the West. They may just take a little while to reach us here.

The Treaty of Waitangi madness infecting the mental capacities of so many of our countrypersons is not evidence of some special sensitivities which New Zealanders possess, or even evidence of some special peculiarities of our history. The Treaty madness is just our own localised variant of a much more widespread insanity, which we might call ‘white guilt’.

David Round: Thoughts for Our Time - Article 1

Let us ask ourselves an absolutely serious question.

What are our world, and our country, going to be like in ten years’ time?

Or, for that matter, twenty years; or for that matter, even five?

Very few of us ask this question. Our imaginations are very limited; it is impossible to imagine any future that is very different from the present. It is very easy to confuse the status quo with the natural order of things.

David Round: The Conservation Issue

There is gunfire every night in the streets of the country’s largest city. The health system is on the verge of collapse. Somewhere around 40% of school pupils regularly play truant. Cabinet Ministers openly talk of replacing elected democracy with an apartheid regime. In the face of widespread opposition a law is pushed through the legislature seizing the water assets of local councils and handing them over to the governing party’s racially-selected mates. Mainstream news media are silenced with strings-attached public funding. High-ranking well-paid positions are given to family members of Cabinet Ministers. Supposedly independent and impartial judges take their instructions from government officials, and decide cases not by the law but by racial ideology. The government appoints an extremist anti-white bigot as co-leader of a new ‘violent extremism research centre’.

The Third World? Well, look in the mirror, New Zealand. This is us.

David Round: Questions of Water Rights and Ownership

Water! Cool clear water. Adam’s ale, the first and most delicious drink of our ancestors; the water of rebirth, the cleanser, the gift of life itself. And in our own over-populated, drying, increasingly desperate days, ‘the new oil’. 

Some of us may remember the film Chinatown, directed by Roman Polanski ~ that takes you back a bit ~ with a plot hingeing around the huge amounts of money to be made by manipulating the Los Angeles water supply. The story was not implausible. 

David Round: Democracy!

  

Colin Craig, the leader of the Conservative Party, recently announced that a bottom line in any coalition agreement with the National Party after the general election would be National’s agreement to introduce binding referendums as part of our constitutional arrangements. These referendums would, presumably, be ones initiated by citizens themselves, such as we already have here in non-binding form. (In some countries governments themselves can propose referendums, to run their ideas past the people.) 

Binding referendums are familiar to us from overseas; in California, for example, citizens vote on “propositions’, put forward by a certain minimum number of voters, at the same time they cast their ballots in general elections. The resulting decision of the voters automatically acquires legal effect.

ICRP: Independent constitution group invites submissions

Independent constitution group invites submissions

Submissions on New Zealand’s constitutional future may be made to the Independent Constitutional Review Panel, chair David Round said today. The independent panel has opened submissions because the government’s official Constitutional Advisory Panel (CAP), which begins receiving public submissions this week, has consulted mainly with Maori, with the general public largely unaware of its existence.

Mike Butler: Dodgy deals and the twisted treaty

Did John Key do a deal with the Maori Party involving repeal of the Foreshore and Seabed Act 2004 before the 2008 election and not breathe a word of it during the campaign? Part of one chapter in Twisting the treaty – a tribal grab for wealth and power, published last week, says just that.

David Round: The Hobbit - and Chris Trotter

You are a very fine person, Mr Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!’

  ‘Thank goodness!’ said Bilbo laughing, and handed him the tobacco-jar.

                                                           ~ The final lines of The Hobbit, by J.R.R.Tolkien